Thursday, July 31, 2014

Since the Commonwealth Games got underway, much praise has been
heaped on the city and its population for the event’s apparent success
so far (even if Usain Bolt was alleged
to have suggested otherwise). So to write something that is strongly
critical of particular aspects of the event and its consequences perhaps
runs a high risk of being declared too negative – and “off message”.
Yet in winning the games for Glasgow, important questions were asked
about the social and economic effects of such an event. And important
questions remain about how the games are working for some Glaswegians.
We have been particularly aware of these as part of a research project into the city’s east end funded by the Openspace Research Centre.

There were protests around different proposed aspects of the games
long before the event began and even as they started. For instance, a
two-day protest began on the day of the opening ceremony by some
low-paid workers in Glasgow council’s workforce over payment for
additional hours and over management-imposed shift changes (which the
council tried and failed to ban through the courts).
Other protests have focused on some of the impacts of the games on different communities. These have included protests over the forced eviction of a family whose house was being demolished to make way for the athletes' village, and over the closure of a day care centre
to make way for other games infrastructure. And at other times there
have been voices and protests around the cost of staging the games in
the context of austerity and rising levels of poverty. Much of this
received little media focus.

Involving local people in a partnership to make the games a success was an often-repeated
claim made by organisers and council officials at the time of the bid
to host the games in 2007. This was said to mean “working with” the
communities in the areas most affected by the games. The event promised
to bring prosperity, economic growth and badly needed urban renewal.
“Legacy” was the byword for a flagship event that was presented as
meeting the long-term interests of Glasgow – and especially those who
lived in relatively disadvantaged east-end areas such as Dalmarnock and
Parkhead, where the opening ceremony and other events have been taking
place, and which is home to the athletes’ village.

Yet just weeks before the games began there was mounting anger among
the residents of Dalmarnock and Parkhead that their lives are being
hugely and negatively affected. “Treated like animals”, feeling “caged
in” and being “kept out” are among the claims
that have been made repeatedly by a number of the residents in the
areas most affected. Such resentment has been as local amenities, a
community centre and local shops in Dalmarnock, were bulldozed to make
way for games venues and other related infrastructure.
The organisers will retort that there have been improvements to the
area. They have built the Emirates arena and the Sir Chris Hoy
velodrome, while the athletes' village will be converted into a mix of
social and private housing. The national hockey centre has been built at
nearby Glasgow Green, the swimming centre at Tollcross upgraded – also
in the east end – and there have been improvements to transport
infrastructure. Previous government surveys have also indicated that many residents are positive about how the games will affect the area in the long-run.

Yet these undoubted steps forward risk being undermined by the way
that the organisers are interacting with the area. There have been
longer-term complaints about the frequent disruption to utility supplies
and there is a general feeling among many residents that the needs of
local people are being overlooked by the organisers. These have largely
been sidelined by the officials, dismissed as a temporary blip in a
hugely successful event that will only benefit residents in time to
come.

Such anger about the disruption to daily life in these communities
reached new levels with the construction within a few months of the
start of the games of eight-foot fencing around the athletes' village –
fencing that has also almost entirely barricaded the residents of
Dalmarnock into their housing scheme. Residents in the streets
immediately adjacent to the village are effectively cut off from it. A
temporary road entrance/exit represents the only way in and out of the
area.
The fence is topped by CCTV cameras along its length, with security
gates in place to allow into the village only those with the proper
security passes. On the whole, the security budget for the games has topped £90m.
Like the upheaval beforehand, there was little if any prior
notification that it would be implemented in such ways and with such an
impact.
People’s access to their properties, their ability to park beside
their homes and even to enter their own area have been severely
curtailed. Fears have been voiced that in the event of a fire or other
incident, emergency vehicles would find it difficult to access some of
the streets. Claims have been made that passes will be required for
locals to access their own area. There are also health worries because
local community health facilities and teams have also been moved out
from the games areas. And there was a recent rat infestation within Parkhead and Dalmarnock due to the extensive building along the River Clyde.

The feeling has been strongly voiced that local people are being
excluded, actively pushed out and contained in what some have a termed a
“prison”. At a large community meeting in the Emirates indoor arena in
Parkhead in late May, some residents said to us that, “had this been the
[more prosperous] west end, such things would have never been allowed
to happen”.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that securing the games is partly
about securing them from the residents of the inner east end. As well as
the fences, security gates and CCTV, the highly visible presence of
police, military personnel and security staff sends out a strong message
that the locals are not to be fully trusted. There is also the fact
that a large proportion of the security staff both in the east end and
elsewhere in the city have been draughted in from London and elsewhere
outside Glasgow – so much for using the games to create local jobs.
Far from the warm words about urban renewal, the treatment of the
east end only reinforces the longstanding stigmatisation of the area and
its people. There are growing demands by many residents for some kind
of compensation, but the response from the organisers and council
officials has been relatively muted so far.
The view has been allowed to develop that the games are not for
ordinary people in the east end to be part of or enjoy. So whose games
are they? Who will benefit? It might not be very fashionable to say it
during all the excitement of the event, but the strong sense among many
residents in the area is that it is not them.

Last week, here in Kabul, the Afghan
Peace Volunteers welcomed activist Carmen Trotta, from New York, who has
lived in close community with impoverished people in his city for the
past 25 years, serving meals, sharing housing, and offering hospitality
to the best of his ability. Put simply and in its own words, his
community, founded by Dorothy Day, exists to practice “the works of
mercy” and to “end the works of war.” We wanted to hear Carmen’s first
impressions of traveling the streets of Kabul on his way from the
airport to the working class neighborhood where he’ll be staying as the
APVs’ welcome guest.

He said it was the first time he’d seen the streets of any city so crowded with people who have no work.

Carmen had noticed men sitting in wheelbarrows, on curb sides, and
along sidewalks, unemployed, some of them waiting for a day labor
opportunity that might or might not come. Dr. Hakim, the APV’s mentor,
quoted Carmen the relevant statistics: the CIA World Fact Book uses
research from 2008 to put Afghanistan’s unemployment rate at 35% - just
under the figure of 36% of Afghans living beneath the poverty
level. That’s the CIA’s unemployment figure - Catherine James, writing
in The Asian Review
this past March, noted that “the Afghan Chamber of Commerce puts it at
40%, the World Bank measures it at 56% and Afghanistan’s labor leaders
put it at a shocking 86%.”

Overall statistics for Afghanistan are grim. A recent article in the UK’s Independent reported that one
million children under five are acutely malnourished, 54 per cent of
girls do not go to school and war has displaced 630,000 Afghans within
their own country. Relentlessly, the fighting continues. Now, on average, 40 children are maimed or killed in fighting every week.

Total fatalities of rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza into Israel, 2001– July 30, 2014: 35

Iron Dome’s efficacy and the number of lives saved, is often expressed in vague or implausible terms, such as “countless lives saved”, “hundreds of lives saved,” and even “thousands of lives saved.” However, Iron Dome was rolled out in stages beginning March 27, 2011. In the ten years prior to Iron Dome, only 17 fatalities were incurred.

Israel’s casualty counts always incorporate numbers of people who have been treated for “shock and anxiety,” as well as “light injuries” resulting from the rush to safety, such as “falling down the stairs.” This practice is not employed in Gaza, nor for any other conflict.

If you thought our post on water shortages was depressing enough, other reports predict famines. The world is headed for a potentially crippling famine by 2050 triggered by unabated global warming and a mounting and little known threat to the world's food supply: ozone pollution.

A study by researchers from MIT and Colorado State University published in Nature Climate Change, a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal explains the world's ability to produce food, however, may be degraded by climate and air quality changes. If everything else stays as it is today, global warming may reduce world crop yields by about 10 percent by 2050.

Ricardo Espírito Santo Silva Salgado is known in Portugal as “Dono disto tudo,” or “Owner of everything.’ Portugal’s answer to the Rothschilds, the oligarch’s family has been calling the shots in Portugal for over a century. It’s the largest shareholder of the country’s biggest stock market listed bank, and controls a string of other financial companies, agricultural, energy, health care and property companies in Portugal and across the globe.

Last week Ricardo Salgado was arrested. He was detained – later released on bail for €3m – in connection with a long-running investigation into money laundering and tax evasion. Ricardo Salgado’s arrest didn’t come about of nowhere. The Espírito Santo family has been under “intense scrutiny” since earlier this year when an audit ordered by the central bank discovered accounting irregularities at the Luxembourg-registered holding company ESI. The central bank has intervened, ejecting Mr Salgado and barring the family from further involvement in the management of Banco Espírito Santo; this followed loss of control of the bank after a €1bn capital increase to shore up the banks finances, even if the family remains the largest single shareholder. Tied to the bank through cross shareholdings, Portugal Telecom has run into trouble with a planned merger with Oi, operator of one of Brazil’s biggest wireless networks, after the Espírito Santo family failed to repay more than $1bn it owed to the telco.

With ESI and its 100%-owned Rioforte now preparing for bankruptcy, the country’s President Anibal Cavaco Silva has admitted that the failure could be systemic. As is the rule in any country where big money is in charge, the law for white collar crime is skewed to the wealthy who can easily afford the best lawyers, bail cash or damages to keep them out of jail. In the end Big Banking – propped up by mega bail outs – will come out of this mess just fine. And the people will keep paying. Until they decide, collectively, they’ve had enough.

"There will be no water by 2040 if we keep doing what we're doing today," said Professor Benjamin Sovacool of Denmark's Aarhus University, who co-authored two reports on the world's rapidly decreasing sources of freshwater. "If we keep doing business as usual, we are facing an insurmountable water shortage — even if water was free, because it's not a matter of the price," Sovacool said. "There's no time to waste. We need to act now."

Most power plants do not even log how much water they use to keep the systems going.
"It's a huge problem that the electricity sector do not even realize how much water they actually consume," Sovacool said. "And together with the fact that we do not have unlimited water resources, it could lead to a serious crisis if nobody acts on it soon...We have to decide where we spend our water in the future," Sovacool said. "Do we want to spend it on keeping the power plants going or as drinking water? We don't have enough water to do both.”

The research says that utilizing alternative energy sources like wind and solar systems is vital to mitigating water consumption enough to stave off the crisis.

Unless water use is drastically minimized, the researchers found that widespread drought will affect between 30 and 40 percent of the planet by 2020, and another two decades after that will see a severe water shortage that would affect the entire planet. The demand for both energy and drinking water would combine to aggressively speed up drought, which in turn could exacerbate large-scale health risks and other global development problems.

The World Resources Institute estimates that in India, "water demand will outstrip supply by as much as 50 percent by 2030, a situation worsened further by the country's likely decline of available freshwater due to climate change".

Ukraine is the world’s third-largest exporter of cotton and the fifth-largest exporter of wheat. According to a 2013 forecast by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Ukraine is poised to become the world’s second biggest grain exporter in the world (after the U.S.), shipping over 30 million tonnes of grain out of the country last year.

According to a report released Monday by the U.S.-based Oakland Institute, over 1.6 million hectares of land have been signed over to multinational companies since 2002, including “over 405,000 hectares to a company listed in Luxembourg, 444,800 hectares to Cyprus-registered investors, 120,000 hectares to a French corporation, and 250,000 hectares to a Russian company.” A deal brokered between China and Yanukovych prior to the political crisis – now disputed under the present regime – granted Beijing control over some three million hectares of prime farmland in the east, an area about the size of Belgium that totals five percent of Ukraine’s arable land.

International financial institutions (such as the IMF) are imposing Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) in Ukraine, which from the experience of the Third World – will undoubtedly lead to severe austerity measures for the people and increase poverty among the Ukrainians.

Ukraine is also one of the 10 pilot countries in the World Bank’s new Benchmarking the Business of Agriculture (BBA) project,” Mittal told IPS, referring to a brand new initiative, still in the development stage, which is connected to the Bank’s controversial Doing Business rankings. This index has been criticised by numerous groups including the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) – comprised of over 176 million members hailing from 161 countries – for favouring low taxes for transnational corporations and lowering labour standards in developing countries as a means of attracting foreign investment. Research into the impacts of the Bank’s ‘Doing Business’ rankings in eight countries – including Mali, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka and the Philippines – has yielded similar results: sharp increases in foreign investments and land-grabbing in a bid to appear more ‘business friendly’.

Oakland Institute report’s co-author Frédéric Mousseau says initiatives like the BBA and others exist primarily to pry open Ukraine’s doors to foreign capital. “These reforms sound good on paper, but when you look more closely you see they are actually designed to benefit large multinational corporations over workers and small-scale farmers,” Mousseau told IPS. “Ranking systems like the BBA push for contract farming, which entails farmers working for corporations, instead of as subsistence producers. We are denouncing this rhetoric, and its attendant struggle between different foreign interests over Ukraine’s resources.”

“Until now, Ukraine had banned the use of GMOs in the agriculture sector,” Mousseau stated. “So when we anaylsed the EU Association Agreement we were surprised by article 404, which states very clearly that both parties agree to expand the use of biotechnologies.”

Monsanto’s Ukraine-based ‘Grain-basket of the Future’ project offers 25,000-dollar loans to rural farmers and Cargill’s 200-million-dollar stake in UkrLandFarming, the eighth largest land cultivator in the world.

“It is necessary to see this in context of the U.S.– Russia struggle over Ukraine,” Joel Kovel, U.S. scholar and author of over 20 books on international politics, told IPS. “Geostrategic politics and neoliberal economics fit together within the overall plan …in which global finance capital under American control and neoconservative leadership imposes austerity, seeks dominion over the easternmost portion of Europe, and continues the policy of encircling Russia.”

The United States have been re-supplying Israel with ammunition that it has used in the Gaza attack. The US allowed Israel to access its strategic stockpile to replenish its stocks of 40mm grenades and 120mm mortar rounds. Additional Israeli requests for US-manufactured ammunition were also being processed in the USA. The US Senate Appropriations Committee added $225m for Iron Dome to a spending bill intended mainly to provide money to handle an influx of thousands of Central American children across the US-Mexico border.

Rear Admiral John Kirby of the Pentagon explained "The United States is committed to the security of Israel, and it is vital to US national interests to assist Israel to develop and maintain a strong and ready self-defense capability.This defence sale is consistent with those objectives."

Just how the death toll at the last count of 1,361 Palestinians threatens the existence of the state of Israel he declined to say. Calling for peace and at the same time providing weapons to be used is a strange sort of diplomacy.

Meanwhile on another battle-front, Russia is the EU’s third-biggest trading partner with cross-border trade of $460bn (£272bn) last year, and the latest sanctions being introduced by the EU towards Russian individuals and banks will hurt European countries more than any other – particularly Germany, but also the City of London.

Germany and Russia have been working on a secret peace plan to end international tensions over the Ukraine. It hinges on stabilising the borders of Ukraine and providing the financially troubled country with a strong economic boost, particularly a new energy agreement ensuring security of gas supplies. The international community would recognise Crimea’s independence and its annexation by Russia. Russia would compensate Ukraine with a billion-dollar financial package for the loss of the rent it used to pay for stationing its fleets in the Crimea and at the port of Sevastopol on the Black Sea until Crimea voted for independence in March. The Ukraine would be offered a new long-term agreement with Russia’s Gazprom, the giant gas supplier, for future gas supplies and pricing. At present, there is no gas deal in place; Ukraine’s gas supplies are running low and are likely to run out before this winter, which would spell economic and social ruin for the country.

Some of Germany’s biggest companies have big operations in Russia, which is now one of Europe’s biggest car markets, while many of its small to medium companies are also expanding into the country. Although Russia now provides EU countries with a third of their gas supplies through pipelines crossing the Ukraine, Germany has its own bilateral gas pipeline direct to Russia making it less vulnerable than other European countries.

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Capitalism must lead to war. War is not the cause of the troubles of society. The opposite is true. War is a symptom and result of the irreconcilable troubles and conflicts of the present form of society, that is to say, of capitalism. The only way to fight against war is to fight against the causes of war. Since the causes of war are part of the nature of capitalism, it follows that the only way to fight against war is to fight against capitalism. the only possible struggle against war is the struggle for the socialist revolution. There is no “separate” or “special” struggle against war. The struggle against war cannot be divorced from the day-to-day struggles of the workers. No one can uphold capitalism – whether directly, as an open adherent of the capitalists, or indirectly, from any shade of liberal or reformist position – and fight against war, because capitalism means war. The wars of the contending national groups of capitalists are not the concern of the workers. All the ruling classes of the capitalist countries are bandits. Their wars, whatever the pretentious and hypocritical slogans, are wars between bandits.

The real roots of war can be seen in the class system of society. The narrow interests of each “national” capitalist class conflict one with the other. It is not love of democracy but pure defence of the capitalist interests of the ruling class that pushes them into war. Democracy can never be imposed upon any country by a foreign power by force of arms. True democracy can be won only in the struggle against capitalist domination. Wars are not accidental. An accident can be the immediate spark for a war but only if all the other conditions for war are present. But there is no such thing as an “accidental war”. Modern wars as a rule have been caused by the commercial rivalry and intrigues of the capitalist interests in the different countries. Whether they have been frankly waged as wars of aggression or have been hypocritically represented as wars of “defense,” they have always been made by the ruling classes and fought by the masses. Wars bring wealth and power to the ruling classes, and suffering, death, and demoralisation to the workers.

The lesson is clear. Capitalism provokes slaughters of people. The Socialist Party’s aim must be to warn the workers against allowing themselves to be misled by the lies of the media and the mutual recriminations of capitalist groups, and to remember that the worker in enemy countries is just as much a victim of capitalist oppression as they are —that even though they are compelled by circumstance to fight against each other, that it will not be long before they are again compelled to help each other against the common foe – capitalism. War obscures the struggles of the workers for life, liberty, and social justice, breaking the vital bonds of solidarity between them and their brothers in other countries.

The working class has no quarrel with the working class of any other country. In support of capitalism we will not willingly give a single life. The end of wars will come with the establishment of socialized industry and industrial democracy the world over. The Socialist Party calls upon all the workers to join it in its struggle to reach this goal, and thus bring into the world a new society in which peace, fraternity, and human brotherhood will prevail. In the midst of abundance, with a productive apparatus which could, well organised and directed, cover more than all the present requirements of humanity, capitalism dooms millions of to misery, suffering and starvation. Capitalism is utterly incapable of assuring the well being of the people and equally incapable of assuring peace.

Once more the exploited are called upon to destroy each other for their respective masters. Once more cities are transformed into devastated blood-soaked tombs. When capitalism calls for war the working class of the world must answer with a call for world socialism.

Former
NSA Director Keith Alexander says his services warrant a fee of up to a
million dollars, due to a cyber-surveillance technique he and his
partners at his new security firm IronNet Cybersecurity have developed, Foreign Policy reported on Tuesday. The claim follows reporting earlier this month that Alexander is slated to head a 'cyber-war council' backed by Wall Street.
Alexander claims that the new technology is different from anything
the NSA has done as it uses "behavioral models" to predict hackers'
actions ahead of time.

In his article, "The NSA's Cyber-King Goes Corporate," Foreign Policy
journalist Shane Harris says that Alexander stated that IronNet has
already signed contracts with three separate companies, although
Alexander declined to name them. He plans on filing at least nine
patents for the technology and finishing the testing phase of it by the
end of September.
While it's not uncommon for former government employees to be granted
patents for their inventions, Alexander is thought to be the first
ex-NSA director to apply for patents "directly related to the job he had
in government," said Harris.
"Alexander is on firm legal ground so long as he can demonstrate that
his invention is original and sufficiently distinct from any other
patented technologies," according to Harris. Therefore when he files the
patents, if he can prove that he "invented the technology on his own
time and separate from his core duties, he might have a stronger
argument to retain the exclusive rights to the patent."

According to critics, Alexander's very experience as the NSA director
has informed his move to the corporate sector—whether or not he
developed the technology independently—and that in itself is cause for
alarm and a possible investigation.
"Alexander stands to profit directly off of his taxpayer-funded
experience, and may do so with a competitive advantage over other
competing private firms," Carl Franzen pointed out at The Verge.
"Is it ethical for an NSA chief to pursue patents on technologies directly related to their work running the agency?" wrote Xeni Jardin of boingboing. "Will the Justice Department investigate? Don't hold your breath."

As independent journalist Marcy Wheeler pointed out on her blog,
there are a multitude of questions still remaining concerning the
legality of Alexander's services, that are unrelated to the issue of
patent legality. Among those she poses this:

with Alexander out of his NSA, where will he and his
profitable partners get the data they need to model threats? How much of
this model will depend on the Cyber Information sharing plan that
Alexander has demanded for years? How much will Alexander’s privatized
solutions to the problem he couldn’t solve at NSA depend on access to
all the information the government has, along with immunity?
To what degree is CISA about making Keith Alexander rich?

The NSA's own actions under Alexander seem to have laid the
groundwork for the exact cyber-defense market the retired general is now
looking to exploit.
When Alexander first addressed Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association shortly after his retirement in March,
company executives were apparently most interested in learning about
destructive programs such as Wiper, which the U.S. government has
claimed was used in cyber-attacks originating in North Korea and Iran.

Harris says the singling out of programs like Wiper is "a supreme irony" in the eyes of many computer security experts, who say that it is nothing more than "a cousin of the notorious Stuxnet virus, which was built by the NSA — while Alexander was in charge — in cooperation with Israeli intelligence."

Things should be hopping this Wednesday at the annual meeting of the
medical products giant McKesson. Activist shareholders will be trying
to water down the severance package that’s awaiting company CEO John
Hammergren.
If McKesson changes hands in a buyout, turns out,
Hammergren currently stands to walk away with $292 million in
severance. Hammergren is also sitting on a rather hefty stash of
McKesson stock and options already awarded to him. He’ll exit McKesson,
Businessweeknotes, with a total windfall of $616.6 million.
McKesson’s board of directors is, of course, opposing any
move to downsize Hammergren’s exit package. Generous rewards, the
company informs us, remain “an important tool for motivating our executives.”

Migrant workers building the first stadium for Qatar's 2022 World Cup have been earning as little as 45p an hour, the Guardian revealed. The pay rate appears to be in breach of the tournament organisers' own worker welfare rules. Pay slips show they are toiling up to 30 days a month for as little as £4.90 a day

Migrant labourers who fitted out luxury offices used by Qatar's World Cup organising committee have not been paid for up to a year and are now living in squalor.

One labourer was hired on a basic monthly salary of £136 and worked 64 hours of overtime in April. He was paid just £29 for the overtime, making the overtime rate 45p an hour. His basic salary, if he worked the maximum 48-hour week allowed, was 64p per hour. Another labourer's pay slip shows he worked every day in April, including 38 hours overtime, for a total salary of £33.50 per week, or £4.80 a day.

Low pay, late pay and even no pay are now an increasing concern.

While back in the UK the attack on migrant workers’ conditions also continues. Welfare entitlements now end after three months rather than the previous six months. And just to add some fear David Cameron issued a direct threat to illegal immigrants that "we will find you and make sure you are sent back to the country you came from".

The gender pay gap between women and men graduates has long been an indicator of pay disparities later along the career path. New data
released by the Higher Education Statistics Agency has shown there is
still a £2,000 gender gap in average graduate salaries six months after
leaving a full-time university course – £19,500 for women and £21,500
for men.
While the median pay for graduates is now level at £20,000, men are
still more likely to be the top earners and women the low earners. Curt
Rice, head of Norway’s Committee on Gender Balance in Research and a
professor at the University of Tromsø, say it’s important to keep in
mind that the median salary is not the average. “While the median is the
same, it’s clear from the data that the average salary for men is
higher.”

Rice points to the fact that there are 50% more men than women
earning between £25,000-£30,000 and nearly four times as many men as
women earning more than £35,000.
Out of the 430,000 university graduates who answered the survey six
months after graduating from a full time course, 66% disclosed their
salary. The mean salary for both men and women has increased £500 for
2012-13 (as the graph below shows), but the difference still remains at
£2,000 between men and women.
It’s worth noting that the survey has been expanded this year, and now includes more graduates from other types of higher education institutions, and so may not be directly comparable.

Click to enlarge

For the first time since the 2008-2009 version of the survey, the
median salary of graduates six months after leaving a full-time
university course was the same for men as for women, at £20,000.
But the results show that women are still more likely to be in
lower-paid jobs and there were more men in the higher salary bands (see
graph below). Of those earning between £25,000 and £30,000, 16.7% were
men and 10.7% were women, while for top-end earners making more than
£40,000, 2.3% were men and 0.5% were women.Percentage of UK full-time first-degree who entered full-time work by salary band and sex, 2012-13.HESAtaken from hereSocialism will mean the abolition of wage slavery - the wages system - ushering in a system in which all will be valued for their contribution to society and none will go without for lack of money.

People who lived, worked or attended school
in areas impacted by dioxins produced at Monsanto’s Nitro plant can
register their interest in obtaining medical monitoring or property
clean up if they haven’t already done so.

The Monsanto class action settlement took
effect May 7. Beginning Tuesday, July 8, the court-appointed
administrator of the Nitro Class Action Settlement, Thomas V. Flaherty,
will have an office in Nitro through Oct. 31 to help individuals who
qualify obtain benefits for exposure to the dioxins, a chemical
by-product of the weed killers produced at the Nitro plant.

Dioxins have been linked to cancer, birth defects and learning disabilities as well as other serious health concerns.

To avoid going to trial, Monsanto agreed in
2012 to spend up to $84 million on a 30-year medical monitoring program —
$21 million for the initial testing, with another $63 million available
if dioxin levels warrant. They also agreed to spend another $9 million
on property clean up.

The claims office, located at 2303 1st
Avenue, Nitro, will be open July 8-Oct. 31 from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Tuesday through Friday, and from 9 a.m. to noon on Saturdays.

Flaherty and Class Counsel Stuart Calwell
said the settlement comes after eight years of litigation and appeals.
Now that the agreement is finalized, settlement money can be used for
“medical examinations and property cleanup services to people and
property affected the production of ‘dioxin’ at the Nitro Monsanto
plant,” they said.

To be eligible for medical testing,
individuals must have gone to school, worked or lived near Nitro in
Putnam or Kanawha counties full-time between January 1, 1948 and Sept.
30, 2010.

A new report from the Oakland Institute, Walking on the West Side: the World Bank and the IMF in the Ukraine Conflict,
exposes how the international financial institutions swooped in on the
heels of the political upheaval and are vying to deregulate and throw
open Ukraine’s vast agricultural sector to foreign investors. Former
Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s rejection of an EU Association
agreement in favor of a Russian deal was a major factor in the crisis
that led to his ouster in February 2014. Immediately following the
change to a pro-EU government, the country’s pivot to the West was
solidified with a $17 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) and an additional $3.5 billion aid package from the World Bank,
both of which require significant economic reforms and austerity
measures that are set to have disastrous effects within the nation.

The report details how the aid packages, contingent on austerity
reforms, will have a devastating impact on Ukrainians’ standard of
living and increase poverty in the country. Reforms mandated by the
EU-backed loan include agricultural deregulation that will benefit
agribusiness corporations and natural resource and land policy shifts
that facilitate foreign corporate takeover of enormous tracts of land.
The EU Association Agreement also includes a clause requiring both
parties to cooperate to extend the use of biotechnology.
"While the World Bank and IMF often disguise their activities in
other countries under the objectives of development, the case of Ukraine
makes it clear that this is just Orwellian double-speak. Their intent
is blatant: to open up foreign markets to Western corporations. It’s
telling that one of the key reforms enforced by the Bank is that the
government must limit its own power by removing restrictions to
competition as well as the role of state ‘control’ in economic
activities," said Frederic Mousseau, Policy Director of the Oakland
Institute and co-author of the report.

“The high stakes around control of Ukraine’s vast agricultural
sector, the world’s third largest exporter of corn and fifth largest
exporter of wheat, constitute an oft-overlooked critical factor. In
recent years, foreign corporations have acquired more than 1.6 million
hectares of Ukrainian land,” he continued. An additional deal signed
with China for 3 million hectares of farmland in September 2013 is in
limbo, since it is unclear whether the freshly minted government and its
new Western allies will allow it to go forward.
Walking on the West Side
exposes how the international financial institutions serve the
interests of agribusiness corporations through deregulation of the food
and agriculture sectors and policies favoring foreign land acquisitions.
Ukraine is also one of the 10 pilot countries in the World Bank’s new
Benchmarking the Business of Agriculture (BBA) project, a widely criticized ranking system that promotes agricultural policy reforms including the deregulation of seed and fertilizer markets.

“The Bank’s activities and its loan and reform programs in Ukraine
seem to be working toward the expansion of large industrial holdings in
Ukrainian agriculture owned by foreign entities,” said Mousseau.
Beyond agriculture, it is expected that reforms pitched as a means to
improve the business climate and increase private investment in the
country will have a devastating social impact, resulting in a collapse
of the standard of living and dramatic increases in poverty.
The acceleration of structural adjustment led by the international
institutions following the installation of a pro-West government is
likely to further expand foreign acquisitions of agricultural land and
extend the corporatization of agriculture in the country. The structural
adjustment program will also likely increase foreign control of the
economy while increasing poverty and inequality in the country. The
World Bank and the IMF, however, have failed to demonstrate how such
programs will improve the lives of Ukrainian citizens and build a
sustainable economic future.

Over half of Britain's landmass is now open to bids for drilling by fossil fuel companies seeking "unconventional hydrocarbons," UK government ministers announced. The new rules make it easier for fracking companies to drill in “protected places” such as national parks and world heritge sites by entrusting the Communities minister with the sole authority to determine if the request meets the criteria of being an "exceptional circumstance." Far worse is the status of wildlife sites which are to receive no specific protection at all.

In Australia the government has okayed the construction of the country’s largest coal mine. UNESCO is concerned with the environmental impact upon the Great Barrier Reef. Although they too produced a list of supposed safeguards the approval waters down precautions and fast tracks its development. The mine requires 12 billion liters of water each year from local rivers and underground aquifers. That’s enough drinking water for every Queenslander for three years. Even ten kilometers away, water tables are expected to drop by over one meter. The burning of coal from Carmichael mine would produce four times the fossil fuel emissions of New Zealand.

While the U.S. has cut its own coal consumption and promotes energy efficiency and cracks down on dirty power plants within its own borders, thereby reducing U.S. carbon pollution, it has increased its coal-export capacity — with coal producers and companies that sell coal seeking to expand that infrastructure even further. Fossil fuel trade has soared under Barack Obama, and threatens to undermine his strategy to reduce the gases blamed for global warming. It also reveals a little-discussed side effect of countries acting alone on a global issue. As the U.S. tries to set a global example by reducing demand for fossil fuels at home, American energy companies are sending more dirty fuels than ever to other parts of the world, exports worth billions of dollars every year. In some cases, these castoffs of America's clean energy push are ending up in places with more lax environmental standards, or where governments are resistant to tackling the emissions responsible for global warming. The U.S. appear to be making more progress on global warming than it actually is, because it shifts some of the pollution — and the burden for cleaning it up — onto another country's balance sheet. Low price coal exports encourage burning coal and discourage the investments in energy efficiency. A sizable portion of the coal exported is via federal coal leasing programs operated by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) that allow private coal companies to mine and sell coal owned by the American Federal government. Using the federal government's method to calculate the social cost of carbon damages expected from publicly owned coal that has been leased during the Obama administration (2.2 billion tons so far), Greenpeace show that one ton of coal has sold for $1.03 on average, but will cause between $22 and $237 in damages to society. The carbon pollution from government owned coal leased during the Obama administration will cause damages estimated at between $52 billion and $530 billion. In contrast, the total amount of revenue generated from those coal lease sales was $2.3 billion.

The political system has been successful. The system succeeded in serving that class for whom the political system was DESIGNED to serve: the capitalist class. The "national interest" is just another code word for the interests of the 0.1%.

"The federal government still gets a tenth of its revenue from corporate profits taxation," Paul Krugman, a Nobel-prize winning economist writes. "But it used to get a lot more — a third of revenue came from profits taxes in the early 1950s, a quarter or more well into the 1960s. Part of the decline since then reflects a fall in the tax rate, but mainly it reflects ever-more-aggressive corporate tax avoidance — avoidance that politicians have done little to prevent."

One tax-avoidance ploy is called “ inversion.” A legal maneuver that allows companies to claim that its U.S. operations are owned by its foreign subsidiary, not the other way around, and uses this role reversal to shift reported profits out of American jurisdiction to someplace with a lower tax rate. The company does not need to move overseas to do this. It's all done on paper although it might sometimes involve opening an office somewhere abroad. Walgreen, a thriving pharmacy business in the U.S., for purely tax reasons, is reportedly about to declare itself Swiss, which "will deprive the U.S. government of several billion dollars in revenue that you, the taxpayer, will have to make up one way or another," Krugman writes.

Why does the government not curtail this tax dodge with legislation??

The claim is that taxing corporate profits hurts investment and job creation. Opponents of more strict tax laws argue instead of closing loopholes the US should reform the whole system by which we tax profits, and maybe stop taxing profits altogether. The goal of a corporation is to maximize shareholder profits and by law this is their number one priority. Governments serve the interests of elites, and they always will. It is all about impoverishing the citizens to enrich the few. Expecting government to be benevolent is like hoping cancer has some health benefits.

Monday, July 28, 2014

Lloyds Banking Group has been fined £218m for "serious misconduct". Lloyds manipulated the London interbank offered rate (Libor) for yen and sterling and tried to rig the rate for yen, sterling and the US dollar. It also manipulated submissions for another short-term rate linked to the value of UK government debt.

"Such manipulation is highly reprehensible, clearly unlawful and may amount to criminal conduct on the part of the individuals involved," Bank of England chief Carney wrote. Will we witness any actual court proceedings against anybody but the lowly servants of the Boards of Directors? SOYMB doubt it very much

Barclays and the Royal Bank of Scotland have previously paid $453m and $612m in fines related to the scandal.

Meanwhile ‘Virtuous Banking: Placing ethos and purpose at the heart of banking’ report by the think-tank ResPublica will be launched on Tuesday by the chairman of the Banking Standards Review Council, Sir Richard Lambert. It calls for bankers to take a solemn oath "I will do my utmost to behave in a manner that prioritises the needs of customers...It is my first duty to provide an exemplary quality of service to my customers and to exhibit a duty of care above and beyond what is required by law...I will confront profligacy and impropriety wherever I encounter it, for the conduct of bankers can have dramatic consequence for society."

Fat chance. Banking executive are already under a legal obligation to place the interests of stock-holders ahead of supposed society’s interests. And we must ask why should such an oath be limited to just one particular industry and not extended to all businesses.

The Cornucopia Institute has called upon USDA
Secretary Tom Vilsack to make public all candidates for appointment to
fill the four vacancies on the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB).
The NOSB, a 15-member board of organic stakeholders representing farmer,
consumer, environmental, retail, scientific, certifying and organic
food processing interests, was established by Congress to advise the
USDA on organic food and agriculture policies and review materials
allowed for use in organic food production and processing.

Past investigations by
The Cornucopia Institute, a Wisconsin-based farm policy research group,
found that prior appointments, during the Bush and Obama
administrations, violated the letter of the law, and congressional
intent, by appointing agribusiness executives to fill slots on the NOSB
reserved for farmers and other independent stakeholders. Public interest
groups have suggested that these extra agribusiness representatives on the board have voted in favor of weakening the organic standards.

Hand it to President Obama for appointing Eric Holder the first
African American Attorney General in US history. Then try to fathom that
after generations of civil and human rights work by African Americans
-- whom the US Constitution once called "3/5 of a person" -- it is
Holder who declared some brown skinned prisoners of war to be
"non-persons." The men are held outside the law by the US at Guantánamo
Bay.

Attorneys for the POWs have asked for an order that would allow group
prayers during the holy month of Ramadan, but Holder's Justice Dept.
has formally replied that the men aren't entitled to relief under the
Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) because the Supreme Court has
not found that Guantánamo's prisoners "are 'persons' to whom RFRA
applies."

Conservationist and environmental organizations in California - The
Southern California Water Alliance, the Environmental Water Caucus, the
Winnemen Wintu tribe, Food and Water Watch, California Sports Fishing
Protection Alliance (to name a few) - are building support for a giant
rally against Governor Brown’s twin tunnels (misnamed the Bay Delta
Conservation Plan), an industrial project to re-engineer the San
Francisco Bay Delta.
Each tunnel, designed to send more estuary water to arid regions of
the state, is large enough for a high-speed rail. According to Barbara
Barrigan-Parilla, executive director of Restore the Delta, "Draining
fresh water from the Delta will only doom sustainable farming and
decimate salmon and other fisheries."

The Bay Delta Conservation Plan is 40,000 pages long. To keep it
simple, the $25 billion water-transfer project is based on a single
assumption: that California's water ecosystem crisis is caused by a lack
- a lack - of engineering projects in the Delta watershed. As if the
Delta needs more steel, more pumps, more cement (and more farmers
dispossessed through eminent domain). The peripheral tunnels, the
industrial heart of the project, do not replace, they actually augment hundreds of dams, aqueducts and pumps that already send water to corporate farms and cities south of the Delta.

The Central Valley Project, initiated in 1933 as an ongoing federal
subsidy for corporate farms, now includes 20 dams, 11 hydroelectric
generators, 500 miles of canals, aqueducts, ditches, dredged channels
and countless pumps.
The State Water Project, begun in 1960, added 29 dams, five
hydroelectric power plants, hundreds of miles of canals and pipes
reaching from the southernmost regions of the state up to Lake Davis,
Frenchman Lake and the upper tributaries of the Feather River, where the
Orville dam, the tallest dam in the United States, towers 770 feet
above its riverbed.
At Tracy, 11 thundering pumps are lined up in a row. An
80,000-horsepower engine moves 6.7 billion gallons of water south
through the San Joaquin Valley, where it runs up to a 2,000-foot-high
barrier - the Tehachapi Mountains. The Edmonston Pumping Plant shoots
water up 1926 feet through 10 miles of tunnels inside the mountains. Except for the Florida Everglades, ruined by development and
unrestrained growth, the SF Bay Delta watershed is the most micro-managed, over-developed estuary in the United States. Including
the mighty rivers that once replenished it, our Delta is now the most
complex, extensive, and costly hydraulic system in the world.

True, there are bigger dams on larger rivers in China, but no region
of the world draws more water from more rivers through more conduits at
greater public expense over greater distances than Southern California.
When is enough enough?

No water-conveyance system - not the Los Angeles Aqueduct that turned
Owens Valley into a dustbowl; not Los Angeles, Palm Springs, Las Vegas
and other desert city conduits that drained the Colorado River so dry it
no longer reaches the Sea of Cortez; not the water transfers that put
Mono Lake on life-support; not the subsidized Central Valley Project
that ended wild salmon migrations up the San Joaquin and Sacramento
rivers; not the massive State Water Project, which Governor Pat Brown
proclaimed in 1960 "a permanent solution to the state's water crisis";
none of the federal- or state-sanctioned projects, nor all of them taken
together, has ever appeased the water appetites of agribusiness,
developers and land speculators and the powerful Association of
California Water Agencies that still frames water policy in Sacramento.
The very title of the Bay Delta Conservation Plan, like Chevron Oil
TV ads on clean air, is disingenuous. Crafted by the development and
water lobby, the plan is profoundly anticonservationist. The entire
project goes contrary to the long-held consensus that fishery declines
and mass habitat degradation are the direct result of excessive
technological interventions in nature's ecosystems.

In 1969, Barry Commoner,
one of the founders of the environmental movement, wrote: "We need to
reassess our attitudes toward the natural world on which our technology
intrudes. . . . Modern technology has so stressed the web processes in
the living environment at its most vulnerable points that there is
little leeway left in the system."
"The larger the technical fix," writes Cynthia Barnett in Blue Revolution,
"the larger the unintentional consequences for the next generation, or
even for the next fiscal year. The constant re-engineering of past
engineering mistakes is a costly drain, which America keeps circling
while our most important water resources go down."
In Unquenchable Robert Glennon writes, "Engineering
mentality assumes that there must be a technological fix to water
shortages. There's no need to live within our means, to tailor land use
plans to available water supply, because an engineering solution can
solve the problem and allow growth and unsustainable water practices to
continue for a while longer. This is how we've always conceived of water
problems: There must be someplace to go for more water . . . a new
pipeline to import more water."

It is absurd to believe that one more engineering project, crafted by
the same power elites that have dominated water policy throughout the
20th century, will somehow bring stability to a state whose leaders
continue to promote growth in desert regions already living beyond their
regional means.

General Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US military, reveals that America are once again re-studying their strategic war plans against Russia, updating military options “we haven’t had to look at for 20 years" and warned that Putin—whom he characterized as escalating the crisis inside Ukraine—“may actually light a fire” he cannot control. And not just in Ukraine or eastern Europe, Dempsey said, but globally.

It perhaps would be wise to remind ourselves of the consequence of a nuclear war. The effect of the nuclear conflict will lead to worldwide famine, deadly frosts and global ozone losses up to 50 percent, researchers have said. Global cooling would put significant pressures on global food supplies and could trigger a global nuclear famine that would lead to death of hundreds of millions and even billions.

Five megatons of black carbon would be released into the atmosphere if 100 nuclear weapons would be detonated that would block out the sun and would be fatal to humans. The nuclear conflict would affect the temperature of the earth which would be begin to drop, there would be ozone losses which would increase UV rays in some locations by as much as 80 per cent. UV rays which increase the chance of developing skin cancer for large swathes of humanity, the researchers have said, adding that the conflict would also affect the rainfall by 9 percent.

Australia's top 1 per cent accounted for 7.7 per cent of the nation's total pay.

180,000 Australians in the top 1 per cent earned an average of just under $400,000 a year before tax. To join the wealthiest 1 per cent, you had to earn at least $211,000. 1.8 million Australians in the top 10 per cent of income earned above $88,000 and accounted for nearly 29 per cent of total income

By comparison, the 18,000 people in the top 0.1 per cent of income earners earned over $600,000, and had an average income of over $1.1 million.

Professor Wilkins said the statistics could not account for tax avoidance or evasion. “The tax data is only what gets declared to the tax office, and it is pre-tax, so there is always the potential that what has been declared isn’t the whole story.”

The top 1 per cent in the US raked in 17.5 per cent of that nation's total income, the United Kingdom,12.9 per cent of total income, and New Zealand, where the top 1 per cent earned 8.1 per cent of total income.

Income inequality has been climbing fast in the US. The top 1 per cent of households accounted for 8.9 per cent of total national income in 1976. A bit over three decades later, that proportion rose to 23.5 per cent in 2007. John Paulson, the famous hedge fund manager who betted against the US housing market, netted $3.7 billion in 2007 -- 74,000 times bigger than the median household income. In 2013, The typical American household is worth a third less than it was in 2003. But even as the average American household’s wealth declined, the net worth of wealthy households increased substantially. The average wealth of the American household in the 95th percentile was $1,192,639 in 2003, and $1,364,834 ten years later, an increase of 14 percent.

China has overtaken the US in terms of income disparity.

China’s Gini coefficient, a widely used gauge of inequality, rose from 0.3 in 1980 to 0.55 in 2010. A Gini coefficient is a measure of inequality, where a figure of 0 represents perfect equality while 1 indicates perfect inequality. A reading of 0.5 is regarded as ‘severe inequality’.

Not only has China overtaken the US, the level of inequality in the world’s second largest economy is also approaching that of highly inequitable Latin American countries like Brazil, Honduras and Mexico. China is now among the least equal 25 per cent of countries worldwide. Few Asian countries are in this group. According to research, previously reported by SOYMB, the top 1 per cent of households account for one third of total asset ownership in China. At the same time, the bottom 25 per cent of households only own 1 per cent of all assets in the country.

China’s widening inequality is not due to deterioration in income. However, the rising income inequality is due to the fact that income for rich groups is increasing much faster than poorer households. Income levels have been rising steadily in the country. Chinese migrant workers, who are usually from poor households in the countryside, have seen double-digit increases in their incomes recently.

For example, income for the poorest 10 per cent increased 50 per cent between 2002 and 2007, according to the China Household Income Project. However, during the same period, income for China’s top 20 per cent households nearly doubled. “As a consequence, the income gap between the richest and poorest deciles widened from 19:1 to 25:1

Another contributing factor to the income disparity is the proliferation of so-called ‘grey income’ for rich households. China’s hidden household income totalled 6.2 trillion yuan ($1.1 trillion) or 12 per cent of the country’s GDP. The income for richest households is much higher than the official figure. For example, the income for top 10 per cent is 3.2 times higher than official statistics. China’s urban rich earn 21 times more than the rural poor.

China’s rural and urban divide is also one of the most important contributing factors to the rising inequality. Researchers estimate that the rural and urban gap contributes to as much as 51 per cent of inequality in China. The country operates a quasi-apartheid system where rural migrants are barred from moving from the countryside to cities on a permanent basis. This policy denies rural migrant workers many social benefits provided to urban residents such as health care and education. This partly contributes to the income disparity between rural and urban residents.

China’s strong economic growth has for a long time masked the worst effects of social inequality, but considerably slower economic growth is likely to bring that deep tension to the surface.

Sunday, July 27, 2014

The richest 1% have personal wealth of just short of one million euros on average, a quarter of adult Germans have no wealth or even owe money. Susanne Klatten, the daughter of the industrialist Herbert Quandt, the man who made BMW the luxury-car colossus it is today, was left 12.5 % of BMW. With her other business interests, she is the 44th richest person in the world.Dieter Schwarz, the head of the rival Lidl supermarket chain, may be the 25th richest man on the planet.

When news of the Greek debt crisis first
broke in 2010, a number of German tabloids called on the country to
pawn its cultural and natural heritage to pay off its debts. “Sell your
islands, you bankrupt Greeks!” ran a headline of the ever tasteless Bild.
“And sell the Acropolis too!” With the bailout of May 2010 in the
making, the populist editors of the right-wing magazine, apparently
oblivious to the historical sensitivities around the German annexation
of foreign territories, stubbornly insisted: “We give you cash, you give
us Corfu.”

Today, more than four
years since the signing of the first memorandum of understanding, it
seems that Germany’s nationalist media — along with the European
investor class and the oligarchic Greek elite — are finally getting
their way. Greece’s subservient government is now pushing hard to open
up new frontiers for privatization, with some 77.000 state assets slated
for sale, including a host of historic marinas and idyllic islands, a
number of ancient palaces, and large stretches of the country’s
spectacular and unspoilt coastline.

Earlier
this year, the government announced that it would move ahead with its
plans to sell off a number of beautiful buildings of great historic
value at the foot of the Acropolis. The Guardian reported
that “among the properties are refugee tenement blocks built to put up
Greeks fleeing the Asia Minor disaster in 1922 and culture ministry
offices housed in neo-classical buildings in the picturesque Plaka
district … that were erected shortly after the establishment of the
modern Greek state. Both are widely viewed as architectural gems.”

The
announcement came on the heels of a controversial decision to rent out
two of the most important archeological sites in Athens — the Stoa of
Attalos, which sits in the ancient agora, and the Panathenaic Stadium —
to companies for private events. Earlier, similar plans had been mooted
by leading politicians of the ruling conservative party to lease out the
Acropolis for photoshoots and other commercial and promotional
activities.

Then, in May, the
government upped the ante by proposing a bill that would effectively
overturn decades-old constitutional protections of the country’s
coastline that restrict development and guarantee open access to the
beach. The Greek privatization fund TAIPED subsequently marked 110
beaches for privatization, including such gems as Elafonisos,
home to the valuable marine archeological site Pavlopetri. Under the
coastal bill, ownership of the seashore — along with any architectural
structures and the surrounding natural environment — will fall
exclusively unto the buyer, who will be able to “develop” their property
and restrict access to non-owners.

The
consequences of this privatization drive would be disastrous and
largely irreversible. Thanks to its constitutional protections, the
Greek coastline has so far managed to avoid the kind of mass development
that has befallen the Spanish coastline — leaving it intact as one of
Europe’s last-remaining unspoilt seashores. As The Press Project points out,
however, the proposed coastal bill “would make it possible for even
large beaches in Greece to be carpeted from end to end with umbrellas
and beach bars,” while the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has warned of a Spanish-style construction boom of holiday apartments that could cover the Greek coastline in concrete.

Needless
to say, the privatization drive goes hand-in-hand with the
strangulation of Greece’s public sector — under direct orders of the
Troika of foreign lenders — which renders the crisis of the country’s
archeological heritage all the more acute. The budget of the Culture
Ministry has been slashed by a savage 52% since 2010, putting at risk
some of Europe’s most valuable cultural treasures by greatly reducing
the available funds to maintain and protect archeological sites and run
public museums. Meanwhile, the Environment Ministry has overtly shifted
its attention from preserving the country’s natural heritage to opening
up new spaces for oil exploration.

How the recession turned owners into renters and obliterated black American wealth.

In 2005, three years before the Great Recession, the median black household had a net worth of $12,124. Yes, this was far behind the median white household—which had a net worth of $134,992—but it was a huge improvement from previous decades, in which housing discrimination made wealth accumulation difficult (if not impossible) for the large majority of African-American families.

By the official end of the recession in 2009, median household net worth for blacks had fallen to $5,677—a generation’s worth of hard work and progress wiped out. (The number for whites, by comparison, was $113,149.) Overall, from 2007 to 2010, wealth for blacks declined by an average of 31 percent, home equity by an average of 28 percent, and retirement savings by an average of 35 percent. By contrast, whites lost 11 percent in wealth, lost 24 percent in home equity, and gained 9 percent in retirement savings.

According to a 2013 report by researchers at Brandeis University, “half the collective wealth of African-American families was stripped away during the Great Recession.” It was a startling retrenchment, creating the largest wealth, income, and employment gaps since the 1990s. And, if a new study from researchers at Cornell University and Rice University is any indication, these gaps are deep, persistent, and difficult to eradicate.

It was crisis day in Parliament
The house was hushed and still
As a member roe with a question...
“Are we doomed to go downhill?”
“I am confident of an upturn!”
The PM made reply...
“If workers pay is held at bay
We’ll all be home and dry!
“How true!How true!” cried the workers
“Let’s end our silly strike!
We don’t want more money...
You can stick it where you like.

“Thanks Heavens!” yelled the bosses
“There’s faith on the factory floor
And now we have this extra loot
We’ll give it to the poor!”
They picked up all the money
And ran on eager feet
And pressed their surplus profits
On the people in the street.
They moved among the dole queues
And boarded every bus
With tear-filled eyes and heart-felt cries,
“You need this more than us!”

Soon all the people prospered,
The Devil became a saint
Now that the wicked unions
Had exercised restraint.
The cities were filled with singing
And the sound of laughter spread
As hand took hand in this golden land...
And pigs flew overhead

From humanity's beginning, until today, humans have roamed ceaselessly all over this planet. The reasons are many. In the hunter-gatherer days, people followed the great herds of animals, which provided them with food and, in some cases, clothing. Escaping from a hostile climate, a natural catastrophe, religious or political persecution, an invading army or simply to enjoy a marginally higher standard of living, have all contributed to humanity's movements.

This aspect of human behaviour has been constant and is, at present, the greatest it's been since WW II. By the end of 2013, 51.2 million people were forcibly displaced due to war, persecution, violence and human rights violations, according to the recent global report issued by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. This is six million more than the previous year when there were 45.2 million displaced in the world, according to the Agency's figures.

In what must qualify as a masterpiece of understatement, UN Commissioner, Antonio Gutteres, said, "The world has shown a limited capacity to prevent conflicts and to find a timely solution for them."

To top himself in stating the obvious in an eloquent matter, Gutteres continued, "Today we not only have an absence of a global governance system, but we have sort of an unclear sense of power in the world." This was said in Beirut on June 20th, when the global report was issued. The increase is largely the result of Syria's civil war. By the end of 2013, 2.5 million Syrians had become refugees in other countries and 6.5 million had been displaced within Syria, the UN Agency said.

The numbers have been swelled by people escaping conflicts and persecution in the Central African Republic, South Sudan, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Forty-two thousand people have fled to Italy in the first four months of 2014, said a spokesperson for the European Union's Border Agency, Frontex. The majority come in overcrowded, hence, dangerous, boats. As one escapee said, "There were 56 of us on a boat made to carry twenty, but no one complained." Those bound for Greece have to stay below deck in almost suffocating conditions for fear the Greek Coast Guard will see them and be turned back - shades of the "Exodus", proving, under capitalism, nothing changes.

Obviously, some do not make the crossing. In fact, 170 died at sea trying to reach Europe this year and 366 migrants died off the coast of Italy last autumn. Many who reach Italy are from Libya and intend to head to other destinations in the EU, causing problems for the EU and the various governments where they settle, regarding employment and housing.

The most terrible aspect of this entire matter is the treatment of refugees in Libyan detention centres, who are waiting for boats to take them to Italy. There are 19 such Centres, run by the Libyan government, which hold anywhere between 1,000 and 6,000 people. Human Rights Watch (HRW) was allowed to send researchers into nine of them and interview 138 detainees, 100 of whom reported some form of torture.

Refugees were hung upside down from trees and whipped. Migrant women and girls were strip-searched and violated. Dozens were crammed into tiny cells with blocked and overflowing toilets. Boys, as young as 14, told researchers from HRW that they were regularly assaulted by being beaten with iron rods or rifle butts, whipped with cables and hoses, burned by cigarettes, kicked and punched, shot with Tasers, probed with electric shocks and hung upside down and beaten. Researchers found up to 60 men and boys crammed into rooms as small as 30 square metres. They also found detainees held in shipping containers.

"We were shocked at the level of extreme violence used by guards at defenseless migrants and asylum seekers", said Hanan Salah, a researcher for HRW in Tripoli. "The stench, filth and overcrowding in some of the detention facilities, were almost unbearable at times", she said, adding, HRW personnel "Found rampant ill-treatment, torture and unfavourable conditions for men, women and children in all nine of the Centres visited, which included, beatings, whipping with cables, electric shocks and intrusive body searches." Some of the violence was a form of punishment for attempts to flee, but mostly, there was, "No apparent reason for it", Salah said. Her suggestion is that Italy and the EU, which financially support many of the detention centres and, in fact, have a budget of 12 million euros for the next four years, should, "Immediately suspend all aid until the Libyan authorities launch an investigation into these abuses and the UN is able to verify they have been stopped."

As terrible as this is and as urgent the need to terminate it, the plain, brutal fact is, that as long as capitalism lasts there will always be human rights abuses. As normal as it is for people to flee oppression, this doesn't mean it will never occur again in any land they go to. Some of the Jews who perished in Nazi Germany had gone there years before, to escape the pogroms in Poland and Russia.

It may well be that many who are now fleeing countries in turmoil were patriotic, before the troubles started and some may even wonder if there is any country where one may go and feel safe and the answer is - "Not permanently."

Nor, can it be argued these types of abuses do not happen under democratically elected governments. The World Socialist Movement has clearly shown such governments are sometimes as brutal as dictatorships; the genocide of North America's Aboriginal People being a typical example.

A socialist recognizes only two countries that of the capitalist class, who own the tools of production and most of the world's wealth and that of the working class who do not. One may like certain things about a country one lives in, but one must never confuse one's liking for a land with it as a political entity. As such, every country, is a means whereby the few live at the expense of the many.

The need to capture raw materials and access to markets, inevitably force competing sections of the capitalist class into war. Furthermore, the capitalist class, wherever they may be, will use repression to maintain their rule, even if those who overthrow them, such as in the Arab Spring, wish for a continuation of the status quo.

In a socialist society where the production of wealth will be for the benefit of all humanity and where all will stand equal in relation to the tools of production, there will be no wars, abuse of human rights or any of the myriad problems capitalism throws at us.

Perhaps, nobody said it better than Charlie Chaplin in 'The Great Dictator' - "You, the people have the power to make life free and beautiful, to make life a wonderful adventure." Then why not organize politically and consciously to have it happen?